Pay 2 Play & Consoles

I personally won't mind. As long as it encourages Sega to release more games for Dreamcast, I'm all for it.

I hope Sega releases the WinCE dev kit for it. Then we'll REALLY have something awesome.

I'm pretty sure I know why this is happening.

PSO v1 was mostly peer to peer. Basicly, you joined sega's server to find people to play with. (it was basically a big chat room that you could run around in). Once you found some people and started a game, it was 99% peer to peer, with maybe a few heartbeat type pulses going back to sega to tell them that your game was still going on and had 3/4 players or something so that more people could join.

The problem with this is that it made cheating REALLY easy. Nothing was authenticated by the server. Now when you log on it will check items/etc and try to find dupes/pumped up items/etc, but nothing can stop pumped characters/mags.

PSOv2 is going to fix a lot of this by making it MUCH more server dependant, more like how many mmorpgs are now. Still quite a bit peer to peer, but most everything will be authenticated by the server when it happens.

The side effect of this is increased bandwidth usage for sega. If you think massive amounts of bandwidth comes cheap, just ask steve or lowtax or anyone running a big site. So most of whatever fee will be for bandwidth. The rest of the fee will be to pay the people who are upkeeping the game, adding new quests/etc.

Considering the MMORPG-style titles have content constantly added, it kinda makes sense to have pay-to-play. Though I wonder what the cap is on the fees - I know I'd never spend $10/month for EQ.

boycott this shit NOW! It's getting out of hand

You gotta wonder, though, what happens when EQ is "over" .. with 500 people left, who are adamant they still want to play, will Verant pull the plug and lose their $1000+ characters?

I thourght they were already doing this with the Dreamcast. Don't you have to join sega.net for $10/month to play their games online?

I paid for my game at the store, I ain't paying to play it on the net. Unless there's a very good reason like... a gun to my head

if cs were pay-to-play, back when it was relatively new, would you?

and ignore the fact that its a mod and assume it was a full standalone game..

One of the big things about pay to play is it lasts a long time. When someone makes a pay to play title they are looking for 2 years of selling the product and getting new subscriptions -at least-, a lot of these games I just don't see generating that kind of interest for two years.

I doubt pay to play is going to be that sucessful outside of role playing games... will have to see.

Pay to play is sort of like gym memberships.

Its pretty good if you use it frequently, but not worth it if you only use it once or twice a month.

Single player is still going to be much more popluar with the general public than multiplayer pay to play. The sticker shock, the internet connection requirement, the lack of solid quality so far, the time invovled to make it worthwhile and the negaitive side of human interaction are all a factor.

I understand that Sega needs to get as much money they possibly can, but this sounds like a bad idea to me. How many people are going to be willing to fork over $40 for the game who already have PSO1 AND pay a fee(even if it is a small one) just to play it online. PSOv2 doesn't really offer that much more content than the first one had and to tell you the truth the new mission downloads for the first have been...pathetic. I know they won't get me to pay for it, unless maybe they cut the price of the game down to $20 for current owners of PSO.


And whats with this comments systems "Username must be longer than 4 characters" stuff? GHEY!

This whole "pay to play" thing is getting carried away...it's fine if they stick to crap like Everquest. But, I'm worried when I see things like Planetside and WWII Online. If that trend continues, more companies will be likely to attempt the same business model. In the end, it will backfire. Most people will only buy and play 1 or 2 games MAX. Sure, I've tried EQ, and Asheron's Call, and UO. But I wouldn't be able to afford to play all 3 at the same time, and in the end, people will buy less games.

is this good or bad?
if you finish a sp game in a week or get tired of multiplayer after a month, you save $$$, or?

goodbye you!

hello!